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“I can wash my own hair.”
“I know this also.”
His fingers slowly slide into my hair anyway, and my eyes close before I can stop them.
It’s gentle, and he takes his time, working shampoo through the strands, his thumbs pressing lightly at my scalp as water runs warm over my shoulders. It’s nearly unbearable. Because after a day of flowers and family and a wedding under an arch, Viktor Karlsson stands behind me in a tiny Swedish cottage shower and washes my hair as though love is a language he’s been speaking all along.
My breath shudders out involuntarily on a silent sob, and his hands pause. “Heidi.”
“I’m okay.”
It’s a terrible lie.
His mouth touches the wet curve of my shoulder. “You do not have to earn this either.”
Another small, helpless sob catches before I can swallow it. Fuck.
I turn and press my face into his chest, careful of the tattoo as my arms wrap around him. He holds me under the warm water, his hand cradling the back of my head, the other spread between my shoulder blades.
“I don’t know what to do with all of it,” I whisper.
“With what?”
“Being here. Have everyone just…” My throat closes and I force the words through it. “Want me here.”
Viktor goes still against me, and I continue.
“Your mom keeps feeding me, and your nieces told me I’m their favorite Aunt. Ebba gave me her ring and then looked at me today like there was already a place for me at the table.” I laugh, but it comes out wet. “And you have my fucking flower tattooed on you, Viktor. I keep waiting for the part where I do something wrong.”
The confession hurts more once it exists outside my body, and I keep going.
“Where I’m too loud, or I forget something, or I need too much, or I say the wrong thing and everyone realizes they made a mistake.” I squeeze my eyes shut against his chest. “I know that’s fucked up. I know your family isn’t mine, and I just don’t know how to trust this when I’ve spent my whole life waiting for good things to come with conditions.”
For several seconds, there is only water, and then Viktor’s mouth presses into my hair.
“I am not waiting for you to become easier, Heidi.” His palm moves slowly over my back.“You can be loud, and you can forget things. You can need things from me. And have bad days and change your mind and take up every piece of space you need.” He leans back far enough to see my face. “None of that makes me want less of you.”
I stare up at him through wet lashes, at the man who has somehow found every ugly little belief I carry about myself and keeps refusing to agree with any of them.
“I don’t know what to do with any of this,” I whisper. “The way it feels like I walked into something that was already waiting with a chair pulled up for me.”
He swallows, rough palms cupping my cheeks. “You just sit down, min fru.”
“That easy?”
“No.” Wet lips press my forehead as he leans in. “But you do it anyway.”
I lean back and meet his eyes, and they are softer and glassier than anything I can survive. Water clings to his face, and his skin is warm and wet under my hands. My fingers reach up to brush his jaw.
“Viktor.”
I could say it right now. The words rise in me, huge and loud and terrifying. He watches them come up my throat, I know he does. But then his eyes drop to my mouth, and the panic catches me before courage does.
So I kiss him. And this time, there’s no meadow to stop us. Only warm water and his hands in my wet hair, and my heart cracked open enough that desire spills through with nowhere else to go.
He turns off the shower, wraps me in a towel, and dries me with such care, it makes my throat ache. We move to the bed, still damp and warm, the window open to the long summer dusk as he lays me down beneath him. And when he kisses me like I’m precious and wanted, it’s soft enough to feel like a real confession.
I don’t know where our marriage contract is. Denver, probably. In a drawer. In a file. In some legal folder in an attorney’s office full of clauses we wrote before I knew what his family’s garden sounded like in summer. Before I knew his mother cried at Roxette songs and his father pretended not to. Before I knew what a flower dedicated to me looked like on his skin.
